Geographies of Innovation: Silicon Valley and Its Imitators

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

SES 00-81146 - Stuart W. Leslie (Johns Hopkins University) "Geographies of Innovation: SiliconValley and Its Imitators" This award supports the research required to complete an electronic, web-based book about the origins of the Silicon Valley model of regional economic development and subsequent attempts to deploy this model elsewhere in the United States and abroad. The medium may or may not be the message, but the medium can certainly reinforce the message. Consequently an electronic book seems a particularly appropriate format for a study of Silicon Valley and its imitators, not only because producing a conventional book with as much graphical and photographic material as the subject deserves would be prohibitively expensive, but because the layout of the book can take advantage of multimedia in a way that underscores the book's thesis about the importance of space and interconnection. The essential template will be a map, which not only shows where these places are and how they are interrelated to one another, but which allow the readers to trace those interconnections throughout the account, underscoring the spatial dimensions of the modern electronics industry. This project seeks to discover whether regions, like corporations, can reinvent themselves. It asks if models of regional development originally intended to foster the growth of new industries in new places could be adapted to reinvigorate older, or at least established industries, in old places. It also asks if other models may be more appropriate for maintaining the vitality of high technology industry in regions facing economic maturity or decline. It considers what role, if any, the state should play in an era of declining federal support for corporate and academic science. It thus asks whether the state should attempt to serve as a catalyst for economic development, either by direct subsidy or by supporting new kinds of partnerships between industry, universities, and state agencies; or whether industrial policy better left in private hands, so that individual corporations, large or small, can decide for themselves how best to leverage their research and development investments. Where other accounts have generally focused on successful efforts at regional development in new places (e.g. Research Triangle Park), this study gives equal attention to older industrial regions which have drawn upon what they believed to be the Silicon Valley model in an effort to retain and revitalize existing high technology industries, and explore places such as South Korea and Taiwan which have translated the Silicon Valley model into new idioms. In addition to reinterpreting Silicon Valley itself, with particular attention to the role of large firms such as IBM, Bell Labs, and Xerox, the planned electronic book will include chapters on the electronics industries of New York State and New Jersey; on Texas and Oregon, regions which have become satellites of Silicon Valley; and South Korea and Taiwan, which have, through deliberate government policy and a strategy of foreign investment and reverse brain drain, developed indigenous versions of Silicon Valley. These choices are not arbitrary. Each of them represents a place that hired Frederick Terman, the acknowledged "father of Silicon Valley" as a consultant to advise them on high technology policy. It will conclude with a comparison of Silicon Valley, the exemplar of postmodern production and Las Vegas, the exemplar of postmodern consumption, each unexpectedly dependent on the other.